e-News bulletin 19 May 2017

Phakamile Hlubi writes that the Department of Higher Education's response to the fees crisis by increasing access to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) has doomed an entire generation of African youth to modern-day slavery through forced indebtedness. iol.co.za/

A recent Sky News survey reveals the harrowing attitudes some South African men hold towards rape. Some claim women "want to get raped," while others say they don't feel bad because "she was good to sleep with." buzzfeed.com/

Much of what Marx said seems to become more relevant by the day. The essence of his argument is that the capitalist class consists not of wealth creators but of rent seekers—people who are skilled at expropriating other people’s work and presenting it as their own. economist.com/

PALESTINE Commemorating the Nakba

Facing the Nakba is a project by Jewish Voices for Peace offering resources on the 'Catastrophe' and its present implications in Palestine/Israel. The Nakba refers to the forced displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians that began with Israel’s establishment, and that continues to this day.

The Nakba created what has now become the world’s longest lasting refugee crisis with camps being set up in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria to house expelled Palestinians. middleeastmonitor.com/

Google now controls an estimated 70% of the online search engine market, but its deep-drilling of user information – where we surf, whom we e-mail, what blogs we post, what pictures we share, what maps we look at, what news we read – extends far beyond the search feature to encompass the “total information awareness” feared by privacy activists. counterpunch.org/

In one of the largest penalties levied against it, Facebook was hit with a €110 million ($122 million) fine by the European Commission for providing “misleading information” over its ability to match its users with WhatsApp’s users when it acquired the chat platform in 2014. qz.com/

The “sharing economy” doesn't exactly share the wealth. President Donald Trump's administration has pledged to cut federal corporate and income tax rates substantially this year, but on the state and local level, sharing economy firms have been waging another tax battle — costing state and municipal governments, by some estimates, hundreds of millions across the U.S. ibtimes.com/

Electronic medical records have become the bane of doctors and nurses everywhere. They are the medical equivalent of texting while driving, sucking the soul out of the practice of medicine while failing to improve care. wbur.org/

The companies responsible for programming your phones are working hard to get you and your family to feel the need to check in constantly. Some programmers call it “brain hacking” and the tech world would probably prefer you didn’t hear about it. cbsnews.com/

Though viewed by many as one of few unbiased news sources in the Middle East, Al Jazeera’s stripes are showing as it expands into social media. The network’s subservience to the government of Qatar has become unmistakably obvious as it tries to expand its audience. mintpressnews.com/

The thing is, being female is very real, and being gendered as a woman as a result is, too – and it is not a form of privilege. It is a form of oppression women have resisted since the creation of patriarchy. By offering a potted history of the cancerous, globalised, Western system of sexual objectification we live under today, I hope to offer a small reminder of that here. This essay tracks the development of sex-based oppression from its roots, through the witchcraze, slave trade, pathologisation of women’s bodies in gynecology, and backlashes to feminist uprising up to today. reneejg.net/

Saul Alinsky, popularly known as the “father of community organizing” for his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, continues to influence those seeking to build and lead successful community organizations. But if the Left is going to rebuild power in the age of Trump, we shouldn’t look to Saul Alinsky for a roadmap. jacobinmag.com/

The historian William Hogeland tells the strangely unknown story of the conquest of the American Midwest in a nameless, barely successful war in the early 1790s against a confederation of indigenous peoples who had lived there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. thenation.com/